


Half-time

by holyfant



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Community: sherlockbbc, Gen, Post-Hiatus, Post-Reichenbach, Sports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-15
Updated: 2012-09-15
Packaged: 2017-11-14 07:02:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant/pseuds/holyfant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly and Sherlock both have their reasons to be there. It's nice this way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half-time

**Half-time**  
  
The frozen field is steaming at the edges. In the slanted wintry sunlight the players look washed out and undefined, their lines blurring into the sudden glare of the low sun dipping under the heavy clouds. Molly leans forward a bit and squints, trying to pick John out amongst the vague shapes of humans stretching their legs in preparation for the game and clapping each other on the back, but it's no use; he's invisible. She wonders for a moment if any of the players will be able to see the ball at all or if the audience will just have to collectively imagine the game.  
  
There's a volley of laughter from the field and she thinks she can pick out John's full-throated laugh, the one she never hears in the morgue or when he's with Sherlock. The one that she hasn't heard in a long, long time, if she's honest. The sun sinks lower under the cover of thick clouds, staining them a marbled orange and pink – looks like snow again sometime tonight, she thinks, and reminds herself to coax Toby in for the night – and the field lights flicker on one by one, suddenly sharpening the lines of field and players. John is chatting to a colleague, still fastening a shoe; the team from Barts seems ready to go, talking and laughing and stamping their feet to keep warm.  
  
She sees John roll his shoulders and press a flat hand to his left one for a moment. He spots her just as he takes off at a jog to take his position on the field – and his hand shoots up, showing her his palm in a broad gesture of hello that is so spontaneous and over-sized it makes her smile behind the protection of her scarf. She returns his wave and then quickly stuffs her hand under her thighs again, the warmest place she can think of.  
  
The referee whistles the players into action and there's a half-hearted scuffle for the ball until it falls between the feet of one of the forwards from the Barts team – Molly thinks she recognises him: one of the only senior doctors to play regularly in the annual football match of friendship between hospitals. The frozen earth of the field crunches under the players' feet.  
  
Fifteen minutes in, after the first enthusiastic tackle from John (“Sorry!” he shouts as he foots the ball, “Rugby instincts!”) Molly looks away from the game for a moment and spots, unmistakably, the rigid, dark line of coat and curls that is Sherlock standing a dozen feet away, at the edge of the audience stands. After the mild surprise, there is a strange, unrefined flush of relief in her chest at seeing his familiar form, his familiar drama of just being Sherlock Holmes, radiating distaste, a long presence with sharp edges even in the fuzzy, failing winter light. It's been so long since she's seen him like that, just showing up somewhere and not looking like he can only stay for a second, not looking like someone who is counting time in his head all the time, every single tick, never letting up, feeling each second with a sharp alertness.  
  
She sits for a second in the warmth of the feeling, in the knowledge that she can use his name again, and that he's standing there with his hands in his pockets at the edge of the most mundane football field in London, looking in on the most everyday of matches, watching normal people doing normal things on a normal day and it's _extraordinary_.  
  
“Sherlock!” she calls out, and even that feels new, because for so long there had to be codes and distance and as long as she didn't say his name there were so many things she could say that she couldn't before, because the words didn't mean the same things anymore. Things can be a bit simpler again now, she imagines. She has to repeat his name for him to hear her – or maybe for it to register as addressed to him.  
  
He turns towards her and then doesn't respond in any way for such a long moment that the bubble of happiness in her belly deflates and there is a rush of all-too-familiar uncertainty. Maybe she is the only thing that's simpler now, and he has only grown away from her further? In the long seconds during which he just looks at her, expressionless, and makes no move, she has already resigned herself to a return to the status quo, which is made just a little more bitter by the way that he had been with her for a while; stilted and haunted and sharp as knives but ultimately letting her in, because he had to, because he had no choice, and because for a while there really was no one else. It's silly to think that the duration of his dependence on her has changed his fundamental way of seeing her: as a pawn to be played whenever the game requires it. She bites her lip against the sting and the strength of the thought, and breaks their eye contact to re-focus on the players – a bad pass from a midfielder, a switch of ball possession. John is on the other side of the field with his hands on his hips; Molly wonders for second if he's seen Sherlock, if the reappearance of that dark spectre registers as reality now or if John still has the reflex of shaking himself out of it, of talking himself out of a delusion.  
  
The humiliation in her gut is hotter than the wintry air, and she closes her eyes for a moment to steel herself against it. Just as she opens them, Sherlock flops down wordlessly next to her on the bench, folding his long legs away from her so that she's mostly face to face with his upper arm when she turns to look at him.  
  
“Didn't expect to see you,” she says, when she's recovered, and the words are feeble clouds rising from her mouth.  
  
“Why should you,” he says, not quite making it a question.  
  
“Dunno,” she says, and in the growing frost her cheeks start to feel warm, because she realises that she literally has no idea what to talk to him about, now that there is no reason anymore to ask him if he needs something, if there is anything she can do, if he needs a place to stay or food to be dropped off somewhere.  
  
She looks at the field instead; John, across the field, is looking in their direction and shading his eyes against the final rays of light playing over the ground. She watches as he raises a hand to shoulder height; a half-hearted hello that he can pretend was something else if he's seeing things wrong – or if he's just plain seeing things.  
  
Sherlock is still as a statue next to her: if he acknowledges the greeting it's in a way that she doesn't know how to read. John starts running and as they watch, deftly intercepts a slipshod pass.  
  
“He's good,” she says, and takes a breath to calm the irrational thumping of her heart.  
  
Sherlock snorts lightly. “He's proving a point.”  
  
“What point?”  
  
He's silent for a second, then shifts and looks at her. He's frowning a little. “That I owe him.”  
  
She follows the line of John running towards goal; she can see Sherlock's head turning, too. She almost cheers him on, then feels stifled by the presence of Sherlock and swallows John's name away. She claps when the ball sails neatly over the goalie's head into the corner. Sherlock doesn't move. The applause is dispersed and tinny in the frosty air; there are only about twelve people watching. Too few people clapping is usually even sadder than no applause at all, but she can see John grinning and accepting shoulder claps from his teammates, and it's all okay. She asks: “He's playing well to prove that you owe him?”  
  
“He's playing well because I'm here, and I'm only here because I owe him.” Sherlock sounds irritated. In spite of herself, she feels the old flutter of... well, something. The way he balances so easily between arrogance and carelessness is something that she's strangely missed: she could always tell when it was an act with him, and the past three years have been an act from start to finish.  
  
The Barts goalie, under siege again, intercepts the ball and throws it back onto the field.  
  
“This is ludicrous,” Sherlock says under his breath.  
  
“It's just a bit of fun,” Molly says.  
  
“It's minus four,” he snaps, “and we're sitting here watching idiots kick a ball around a field.”  
  
She's silent for a while, because it _is_ minus four, probably, if he says so, and that _is_ what they are doing, and that they are doing it really says enough.  
  
“So he forced you to come, then?” she finally asks, smiling a little.  
  
“Asked me to,” he replies, and after a beat adds: “which is the same thing.”  
  
And she does understand, she does, because she's seen how it chipped away at him, those months that turned into years despite his planning, the accumulated guilt over so many things, the increasing weight of an awareness of the hurt he was causing.  
  
“Is he all right?” she asks, for the first time since he told her to stop. It's different now.  
  
“He will be,” Sherlock responds almost immediately; it sounds like a challenge, which seems right for John. She watches as John's team fends off an attack on goal.  
  
“Are you all right?” she blurts out; words that she'd sworn to herself she wouldn't say, because it's no business of hers, and that John even wanted her to come tonight is a gesture of forgiveness that she's not sure she's earned yet, and that Sherlock is sitting next to her is a gesture of – of too much, of too many things to untangle, and she's told herself that things are back to normal now, and her part is played.  
  
“What do you think?” he says a little sharply, but when she looks at him he's looking at her, too, and that it's an honest question rather than a snappy rhetorical one takes a moment to register.  
  
“I think,” she begins, then falters. The breath she draws is cold-sharp in her mouth. “I think you will be,” she says, then swallows a flood of other things to say, because the codes are gone, they're sitting next to each other, their coats almost touching, and some things are off limits again.  
  
He seems to like what she says, and holds her eyes for another moment before looking away to the field.  
  
“Said sorry then yet, have you?” she asks, which is really off limits as well, but, well; and when his eyes snap back to hers she deliberately looks away (because those eyes have the power to make her eat her words, and sometimes she can't let them).  
  
There is a long silence in which there is a bit of excitement on the field, ending in a near-goal from the Barts team, and in which she wonders whether she really feels his eyes on her face or if that's – something else.  
  
When he speaks, he says: “You're sitting on your hands.”  
  
“Er... yeah,” she says, a little startled. “It's cold. Toby coughed up a hairball on my gloves.”  
  
He sighs, pulls his hands out of his pockets and snaps off his leather gloves with harsh movements. He thrusts them at her, and when she doesn't immediately take them lets them flutter into her lap.  
  
“It's minus four,” he says – by way of explanation? As an excuse? As a simple observation? After a second, she pulls her hands out from underneath her thighs and slips her fingers into the gloves, smooth and supple. They're far too large for her, and they are warm from Sherlock's hands. Her fingers tingle – renewed blood flow, sudden warmth, something else.  
  
“Thanks,” she says. He tucks his hands in his pockets in response and his body sags a little, as though he's finally let out a breath he'd been holding.  
  
When he takes his hands out again, it's to applaud – and she's missed the goal, because she was looking at Sherlock, but that's all right. His hands are large and suddenly very white against the darkness of the rest of him and he's clapping; two, three hard snaps of hand on hand, a confident sort of applause. When she looks up she notices that John is looking their way from halfway inside the huddle of people congratulating the bloke who scored the goal.  
  
“Almost half-time,” she says and doesn't really know why.  
  
He makes a non-committal noise. She thinks about half-time and full-time and no time. It's nice that there is half-time again. That's more than enough for now.  
  
She tightens her hands into fists and likes – no, something else – the way Sherlock's gloves make the small sound that smooth, worn leather makes when it bunches. A crackle softened by use.  
  
The clouds are breaking up. Above the sharp glare of the field lights a few stars still manage to struggle alight. No snow then, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the sherlockbbc LJ community's commfest. As always, thanks and love to my amazing beta, hechicera!


End file.
